“On July 25, they originally reported: Trump 40.3 percent and Clinton
37.2 percent, which was a Trump margin of 2.8,” he said. “They have
recalculated that now–which I have never heard of–they changed that
data, to be: Clinton 40.9 and Trump 38.4, which is a 2.5 margin for
Clinton.”

The July 25 Reuters poll now shows a result that reflects a 5.3 percentage point flip from the previously published results, he said.

“Now look at July 26,”
he said. “On July 26 they had Trump at 41.5 percent and Hillary at
36.3. That was a 5.2 Trump margin. Then, in the new calculation, they
claim that Clinton was 41.1 percent, Trump was 37.5, and the margin was
3.6 for Clinton. Same poll. Two different results. Recalculated, after
you’ve announced the other results.”

“What you get is an 8.8 percentage point margin change, almost nine
points swinging from one candidate, based on some phony, some bizarre
allocation theory that you claim you know where these people are or you
are just leaving them out,” he said. “I actually believe they are
allocating them because they are claiming they are really Clinton voters
and they are using something to move them to Clinton.”

White noncollege voters aren’t all cultural conservatives, but they
often lean that way—and Obama’s progressive politics have pushed them
further away from the Democrats....

The story of what makes white working-class men vote and in which
direction is a complex one. They’re not monolithic by region or
religion. And it’s not easy to measure them by occupation either, so
pollsters use the index that’s easiest to measure and less prone to
error, even though it’s less than perfect: whether they went to college....

When asked whether government should do more to solve national
problems or leave more to individuals to decide, Americans overall
split, 45 percent in favor of more government intervention to 51 percent
against. By contrast, a full 62 percent of white working-class men said
government should do less.

“You look across the board and they’re
outliers. That is really powerful, and once their income started declining, they became very receptive to Republican arguments that [the
government was] taking your money and giving it to others,” says Ronald
Brownstein of Atlantic Media, an expert in white working-class voting
who mined the data and used the results of a Pew poll in June.

That
sense of aggrievement also has a cultural element. Today it's socially acceptable to poke fun at "white men" or "white guys."For working-class
white men who have seen their wages and wealth drop as the economy has
come to value “brain” workers more than manual laborers, there’s no
feeling of white privilege, even if their lot is far better than being a
minorityin poverty. Indeed, with women now more likely to enter and
finish college than men, and enjoying better health and longer life
expectancy, the frustration of poorly educated white men is
understandable.

“If you’re a white male and you don’t have a
college degree, you’re struggling and frustrated; and often you’re not
going to blame yourself,” says Ed Sarpolus, a nonpartisan pollster in
Michigan who has studied working-class voters.

“No group has declined more in standing,”notes John Lapin of the Center for American
Progress, who has studied the working-class vote.Indeed, the white
poverty rate is acceleratingmuch faster than the minority poverty rate,
and the white working class is among the most pessimistic groups in the
country—more even than poor blacks or poor Hispanics.

Declining union membership...

But working-class whites are not the same as they were even 10 years
ago. With family breakup accelerating, they’re more likely to live in
single-parent households and have out-of-wedlock births at rates higher
than in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a U.S. senator, issued
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, his controversial report about the breakup of black families.

And
there are important regional differences. Working-class whites in the
South are much more estranged from the Democratic Party....An even
closer parsing of data shows how the collapse of Democratic support
among white working-class voters extends beyond the South to the
mountain West and Plains States. The president garnered a majority in
Maine and Vermont....

The big question is how Hillary Clinton might fare with these voters,
should she run for president in 2016. There are some indicators in her
favor. She’s part of a Clinton brand that won two presidential elections
in part by minimizing the loss of noncollege white men....Whether the narrow pool of Democratic primary voters will prove
representative of voters as a whole is a question that will occupy
Democratic strategists between now and 2016.

Still,
staffers in Hillaryland had a saying that, among women, you could tell a
(white) Hillary voter by her shoes, specifically whether they’re worn
out from standing much of the day, as would be those belonging to a
waitress, a teacher or a nurse. But a new Quinnipiac University poll,
Brownstein notes, shows her with only 27 percent of the white noncollege
male vote—behind even Obama’s 31 percent.

Of course, Hillary
wouldn’t need to win these voters; she would only have to stop the
hemorrhaging of them to the Republicans. “She’s not going to carry
[white] noncollege voters. It’s not like they have to get these voters
to love them,” says Ruy Teixeira, author of several books on how the
white working-class votes....

Reihan Salam of National Review and Ross Douthat of The New York Times have written, in their book Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream,
that far from cultural issues being bait and switch, as Democrats
charge, they are essential to working-class survival:

The pollster Stanley Greenberg was a key
architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election. He studied white-majority
Macomb County in Michigan, which had drifted from the Democratic fold.
He found what’s now a familiar pattern of alienation among working- and
middle-class whites from the Democratic Party over everything from taxes
to the death penalty.

He’s more sanguine than many about the
Democrats’ prospects with white working-class voters and sees them, at
least outside the South, Border States and parts of the Mountain West,
as persuadable. “It’s where race and religion meet,” he says of those
uncompetitive areas. But he thinks that when Democrats stop thinking of
working-class whites as factory-floor hard hats—“They’re long gone,” he
half jokes—and more likely cashiers and customer-service
representatives, they’ll be able to compete more effectively for their
votes.

Andrew Levison, author of The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think, and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support,
shares Greenberg’s view about how many persuadable working-class voters
remain. But he thinks a populist appeal isn’t enough....

It may be that, in time, demographics will
settle the matter, as women and minorities vote in ever larger numbers,
making the working-class white male less relevant to elections and to
the economy. But no voice in American life should be ignored, even if it
lacks the punch it once had.

Franklin Roosevelt lauded “the
forgotten man.” (Conservatives have used the phrase, too, and did so
even before Roosevelt, who popularized it.) In an ideal world, each
party would engage in a contest of ideas to help working-class voters.
Election Day is close, but that day is a long way off."

Germany is on high alert following a spate of deadly attacks last
July, two of which were claimed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant (Isil).

On July 18 an Afghan refugee attacked passengers with an axe on a
regional train in southern Germany, injuring four people before he was
shot by police.

Officials said they found an Isil [ISIS] flag in the 17-year-old’s room and
it later emerged that he had pledged allegiance to the group in a video
posted online.

A week later, on July 25th, a Syrian refugee blew himself up in the southern town of Ansbach, killing himself in the blast and wounding 12 others.

When police raided his flat they
found violent videos, bomb making materials and a message on his mobile
phone in which he said he carried out the attack on behalf of Isil
leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Thomas de Maziere, the German Interior Minister, has already called
for tougher security measures which would include a ban on the burka and
legal reforms that would make it easier to deport terror suspects.

He is also in favour of a Europe-wide proposal to force the
developers of encrypted messaging services such as Telegram to hand over
data to the security services.

The matchup hasn’t been this close since late July, when Morning
Consult’s poll showed a 3-point Clinton lead over Trump, 43 percent to
40 percent....

The poll results come after Clinton gave her most direct speech thus
far attacking Trump on his racial rhetoric, while the GOP nominee
continued his bid to woo black and Hispanic voters.

Trump’s campaign also floated new ideas about allowing immigrants who
are illegally residing in the United States to stay in the country, an
attempt to soften the real estate mogul’s harsh immigration rhetoric.
But the mixed signals from the Trump campaign aren’t winning over
immigration advocates.

Clinton has also faced questions about her ties to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state.

Trump’s outreach to African American voters appears to be falling
flat among that demographic, with only 5 percent of black voters saying
they will vote for Trump; 79 percent of African American respondents say
they will vote for Clinton, with 16 percent undecided.

Trump also significantly trails Clinton among women voters — 44
percent to 35 percent — with 21 percent saying they don’t know or have
no opinion....

Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein
are struggling to gain traction with voters and, barring a major shift,
are unlikely to make the debate stage scheduled for late September.
Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, has support from 8
percent of respondents, while Stein is the first choice for 3 percent of
voters.

It revolves around Trump’s purchase and operation of the
famous Mar-a-Lago estate, built in the 1920s by Post Cereal heiress
Marjorie Merriweather Post. Trump had recently purchased the sprawling,
seaside estateand turned it into a club. This being located in upscale
Palm Beach, Florida, there were other prestigious clubs in the area,
clubs that catered to the old order of upper crust Palm Beach society.
The problem? Quietly, other clubs had long barred Jews and African Americans— which is to say they practiced a quiet but steely racism....

The (WSJ) story, which quotes Abe Foxman,
the longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League, says, in part, the
following:

"Mr. Trump also has resorted to the courts to secure his foothold
here, and many residents wince at the attention his legal battles with
the town have drawn-to the town in general, and to theadmission
practices at some of Palm Beach’s older clubs in particular.

The film he chose to sendthe Palm Beach town council was no accident.Guess Who’s Coming to Dinnerwas released in 1967 and starred film legends Spencer Tracy, Katharine
Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier. The Oscar-winning story revolved around a
liberal, upper-class older couple who are stunned and discomfited when
their daughter, played by Katharine Houghton, brings her new fiancé —
Poitier — home to dinner and an introduction to her white parents.As
liberals, her parents were staunch supporters of racial equality and had
raised their daughter accordingly. Yet suddenly, in comes the very
personal reality of equality when their daughter waltzes in the door
after a vacation with husband-to-be Poitier, a black widower and doctor.
Soul searching about just how devoted to equality they really are
ensues.

A sluggish
global economy and the oil industry’s long-standing slump have pummeled
U.S. exports and business investment. Those headwinds have offset strong
consumer spending, which makes up about 70% of economic activity.

Last
quarter, exports increased 1.2%, a bit more slowly than previously
estimated, while imports rose 0.3%, up from the modest decline cited in
the last tally. That widened the trade deficit, hurting growth. A strong
dollar has made U.S. exports more expensive for overseas customers
-- amplifying the effects of economic struggles in China and the euro
zone -- while imports are cheaper for U.S. consumers.

Business stockpiling subtracted 1.3 percentage points from growth.
That’s slightly more than believed and marks the fifth straight quarter
that paltry additions to company inventories have been a drag on growth.

On
the bright side, consumer spending surged a robust 4.4%, a bit more
sharply than first estimated....

And business investment fell 2.5%, less
dramatically than initially estimated, in a possible sign that
a prolonged slump in capital spending may be winding down.

This
was the government’s second estimate of economic growth in the second
quarter. It will release a third and final estimate in coming weeks....

The
economy’s recent weak performances are among the concerns that could
keep the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates at a mid-September
meeting. The Fed boosted its key rate in December for the first time in
nine years but has since held it steady."
...........................................

I also know that I’ve spent every single day of my
presidency focused on what I can do to grow the middle class and
increase jobs, and boost wages…Here’s the good news: Wages are
actually growing at a rate of about 3 percent so far this year. That’s
the good news. Working Americans are finally getting a little bigger
piece of the pie. But we’ve got to accelerate that.

If you’re really concerned about pocketbook issuesand
seeing the economy grow, and creating more opportunity for everybody,
then the choice isn’t even close. If you want someone with a lifelong
track record of fighting for higher wages, and better benefits, and a
fairer tax code, and a bigger voice for workers…you should vote for
Hillary Clinton.

“In addition to the [6.9 million recognized] unemployed, 28 percent
(48.5 million) of working-age (16 to 65) natives were not in the labor
force … This is much higher than the 25.3 percent rate (42.1 million) in
the same quarter of 2007 and the 22.9 percent rate (35.7 million) in
2000,” said a July study from Steve Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, “

Overall, “55.4 million working-age, native-born Americans [were]
without jobs in the first quarter of 2016, compared to 41.1 million in
the same quarter of 2000,” he wrote.In contrast, when immigration is kept low, wages tend to rise
during economic growth. For example, wages rose sharply in the
low-immigration decades between 1925 and 1969. Blue-collar wages also
climbed in 1998 and 1999 when the fast-growing economy ran out of
workers. Also, in Arizona, wages and research into labor-saving technology rose once many illegals were sent home in the mid-2000s.

Currently, U.S. agriculture companies are
complaining about rising wages because many of their illegal-immigrant
workers are migrating away from the farms and towards the cities. “We’re
probably experiencing the most critical labor shortage” since 2002,
complained Tom Nassif, president and CEO of the Western Growers
Association, a trade association of agricultural companies who want
illegal-immigrant farm workers to get work permits, perhaps via an
amnesty deal. “Wages are going up dramatically… [the labor shortage] encourage[s]
people who are farmworkers to play musical chairs by going from farmer
to farmer, seeking higher wages, and the farmers are competing with each
other by raising those wages,” he complained.

Obama tried and failed to get a wage-cutting amnesty deal in
2013 because he’s willing to let Americans’ workplace wages stall if he
can increase the Democratic Party’s power to deliver benefits via
government.

Obama made that political strategy clear in 2006, when he admitted
in his autobiographythat large-scale migration hurts Americans wages.“This huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to
the economy as a whole… [but] it also threatens to depress further the
wages of blue-collar Americans,” including blue-collar
African-Americans....

He’s also provided a quasi-amnesty to almost 800,000 illegal
immigrants since 2012, tried to provide a quasi-amnesty to four million
illegals in November 2014, is bringing in 65,000 unskilled Syrian
migrants by October, and pushed for the 2013 immigration bill that would
have addedat least 33 million legal migrants to this nation of 310
million Americans by 2023. Obama has also expanded the annual inflow of
temporary “guest workers” from 700,000 per year to roughly 800,000 per
year.

In contrast, Donald Trump’s proposed immigration reform would reduce
unemployment, drive up Americans’ wages and reducing housing costs,
according to a recent Wall Street study that claimed to be critical of his policies."

The final official text
of his Jan. 12 State of the Union speech said “Immigrants aren’t the
reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the
boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term
returns.”

But it is also a politically awkward admission by Obama — because
Obama and his establishment allies in the GOP and in business want to
increase the annual inflow of foreign workers and consumers into the
U.S. economy. House Speaker Paul Ryan is one of those allies — he’s been
pushing for years to allow companies to hire “any willing worker” from the U.S. or overseas.

Those wage-cuts and profit-spikes are why the GOP’s CEO supporters want
greater immigration. Of course, the CEO will be long retired when the
migrants become citizens and subsequently vote Obama’s younger allies
into power, just as Democrats now use immigrants’ votes to dominate the economically divided state of California.

That’s also obviously a bad deal for Americans, who see their own and
their children’s wages, political power and civic peace traded away for
the mutual benefit of progressives, business groups and foreign
migrants and cultures.

Obama has long known that mass immigration cuts wages
— but that’s a price he’s willing to impose on Americansto achieve his
progressive fundamental transformation of the United States. Obama made
his intentions clear in 2006, when he wrote in his autobiography that
large-scale migration hurts the wages of African-Americans.

But those immigrants would help the Democratic Party, he wrote. “In
my mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually
intertwined, the cornerstone of a coalition that could help America live
up to its promise,” he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.”

"As part of our monthly tradition showing the gaping disparity in the quality of the US
labor market, we present the breakdown between the lowest paid jobs
available, those for workers in "food services and drinking places",
also known as waiters and bartenders, and compare them to the number of workers in the traditionally best paid sector, manufacturing.

This
explains why contrary to the BLS's seasonally adjusted models
optimistically showing a pick up in wage growth, the US economy has so
far failed to observe any form of benign demand-pull inflation.

Back in January, the ECRI's Lakshman Achuthan’s made a troubling observation.
The sustained decline in the official jobless rate – now near the Fed’s
estimate of “full employment” – is a misleading indicator of labor
market health, he said.

Indeed, the stagnation in nominal wage
growth is consistent with the weakness in the employment/population
(E/P) ratio. After dropping to three-decade lows in the wake of the
Great Recession, the E/P ratio has barely improved since the fall of
2013, reversing only a quarter of its decline from its pre-recession
highs.

Furthermore – as a breakdown of theE/P ratio by education level
shows – even this modest improvement is illusory.